Career

Worked for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, architectural firm, c. 1977-78;
with Pei Cobb Freed … Partners, c. 1981-93; founded own firm, Wendy
Evans Joseph Architecture, New York City, 1993; president of the New York
City chapter of the American Institute of Architects, 1999-2000.

Awards:
Henry Adams medal, American Institute of Architects, for best student
thesis while at Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Rome Prize,
American Institute of Architects, c. 1983.

Sidelights

American architect Wendy Evans Joseph has built her professional
reputation as a talented designer of museums and other public spaces. She
and her eponymous New York City firm have also ventured into the hotel and
restaurant sector, most notably with a renovation of a landmark Frank
Lloyd Wright office tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Born in the mid-1950s, Evans Joseph completed her undergraduate education
with top honors at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. She graduated
from the school with a major in design, but had originally begun her
college career intending to study math and physics. One day, an
architecture student happened to walk past her, and glanced at the
notebook Evans Joseph had covered with her impressive sketches of the
university's buildings, and encouraged her to rethink her chosen
major.

After finishing at Penn, Evans Joseph worked for an architectural firm in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year before entering Harvard
University's Graduate School of Design. Once again, she excelled at
her studies, graduating first in her class and winning the coveted Henry
Adams Medal from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) at her school
for best senior thesis. Her winning proposal involved a design for the
entrance to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and one of the judges had
actually done the new addition, the Charles Ship-man Payson Building,
himself. That architect, Henry N. Cobb, was impressed enough to hire Evans
Joseph for her first job out of Harvard, at Pei Cobb Freed …
Partners, the New York City firm founded by Cobb and his more famous
partner, the architect I.M. Pei.

Evans Joseph spent a dozen years with Pei Cobb Freed, seven of them as a
senior associate. She was involved in one of the firm's most
important
projects, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which
opened to the public in 1993. That same year, she also struck out on her
own and opened her own practice in New York City, Wendy Evans Joseph
Architecture. By then she had wed for the second time, to merchant banker
Peter Joseph, with whom she would have two children. But tragedy struck
when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and he died in 1998 at the age
of 47.

Evans Joseph was immersed in caring for her ill husband in 1996 when she
was contacted by Cathy Bonner, founder and president of a planned
Women's Museum in Dallas, Texas. Bonner had just read an article
about Evans Joseph's work, and wanted to meet with her about
designing the museum building. Evans Joseph's firm had never taken
on such a large-scale project to date; moreover, her personal family
commitments were considerable at the time. But the Texas museum's
board "hung in there until I got my life in order and could focus
on their project, " she told
Dallas Morning News
writer David Dillon. "They didn't even check references.
They just had faith that I could figure things out."

The 70, 000-square-foot Women's Museum opened in September of 2000,
and in the interview that appeared in the
Dallas Morning News
with Dillon that same month, Evans Joseph conceded that not everything
had been built as she originally hoped. "It was my first solo
building, " she noted. "I didn't have this big
portfolio of work that enabled me to get my way. All I could do was say
maybe this or that might work, and sometimes that wasn't
enough." That same year, she was selected to design another museum,
the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the culturally rich historic center of
African-American life in New York City.

With her firm's reputation on the rise, Evans Joseph won her first
significant hospitality project, for Long Island's Greenporter
Hotel and Spa, in the North Fork community of Greenport outside of New
York City. Her task was to renovate a vintage 1950s-era motel, and it was
a tough one. "Not only was the building old, " she told
Rachel Fishman in
Hospitality Design
, "it hadn't been built all that well in the first
place." But Evans Joseph's renovation won a citation on that
magazine's annual awards list of notable buildings in 2002.

Evans Joseph's next major commission was also for the hospitality
industry, The Inn at Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The new
facility was to be located inside a renowned Frank Lloyd Wright building,
the Price Tower, a Bartlesville landmark that had fallen into disrepair.
Wright was a legendary figure in the world of twentieth-century American
architecture, and his 19-story Price Tower was a rare example of only two
skyscrapers the master completed during his prolific career. Built in the
mid-1950s for the H.C. Price Company, an oil firm, it was originally used
as offices and living quarters for company executives. Wright was known
for meticulously planning everything about a building, even down to its
window treatments, and Evans Joseph borrowed some of those ideas, but
adapted them by using contemporary materials. The Inn opened in mid-2002,
and the restaurant and 21-room hotel helped provide the financial income
for the next stage of the Price Tower renovation, the adjacent Price Tower
Arts Center.

Evans Joseph is the past president of the New York chapter of the American
Institute of Architects, and she also sits on the advisory boards of the
Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and for the
Graduate School of Design at Harvard. She is also involved with the
American Ballet Theater, a legacy of her second husband's generous
support of that institution. She remarried in 2001, to molecular
geneticist Jeff Ravetch, whom she met through her work. "I'm
used to new clients, so I didn't notice when Jeff decided to
'get the girl' by having me design an observatory, "
she told
More
journalist Julia M. Klein. "He didn't wind up hiring an
architect at all—he wound up marrying an architect, which is a lot
cheaper."

Evans Joseph and Ravetch live in a Manhattan penthouse with their blended
family of four children. They spend a month or two in Italy each summer, a
legacy of her year in Italy when she won the AIA Rome Prize in the early
1980s.